GROW YOUR MANUSCRIPT YOUR WAY

Tailor-made for creating long manuscripts, Scrivener lets you break up your writing into sections as small or large as you like. At its heart is a simple ring-binder metaphor—gather material and switch between writing, notes and research with ease. Got a great idea but don’t know where it fits? Compose your text in any order you want—write when inspiration strikes and find its place later.

SEE THE FOREST *OR* THE TREES

Whether you plan or plunge, Scrivener works your way: hammer out every last detail before typing a word, or carve out a draft and restructure later. Or do a bit of both. All text sections in Scrivener are integrated with an easy-to-use project outline, so working with an overview of your manuscript is only ever a click away, and turning Chapter Four into Chapter One is as simple as drag and drop.

RESEARCH WITHIN REACH

Need to refer to research? In Scrivener, your background material is always at hand, and you can open it right alongside what you’re working on. Write a description based on a photograph. Transcribe an interview. Or check for consistency against an earlier chapter.

GETTING IT OUT THERE

Once you’re ready to share your work with the world, turn your manuscript into a beautiful ebook or PDF, export to Word, or simply print it out. You can even share using different formatting, so that you can write in your favorite font and still keep your editor happy.

Scrivener’s users include best-selling novelists, screenwriters, students, academics, lawyers, journalists and translators. It won’t tell you how to write—it just provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing.

FEATURES

Get Started

Project templates for novels, scripts, essays and more

Import many different types of file

Easily split imported text into separate sections

Get Writing

Familiar writing and formatting tools

Easily switch between working on small sections, chapters and the whole manuscript

Styles support

Distractionfree fullscreen mode

Scriptwriting mode for screenplays, stage plays, comic scripts and more

Live word count

Mark up text with comments

Footnote support

Keep “snapshots” of older versions of your writing

Name generator

MathType support

Set writing targets

Track your writing history

Automatic backups

Find Your Structure

Write in any order and reorganize later

Assign a synopsis to any section, then work with an overview of your manuscript in the outliner

Plot your ideas using the corkboard

Track different threads using labels

Fast projectwide search

Apply custom icons to your sections

Use document templates for new sections (e.g. character sheets in novels)

What’s New in Scrivener 3.1.1

Note: 3.1.1 is a patch for 3.1. It fixes a bug that could cause a 10.14 crash on startup for existing users who had customised their appearance preferences.

DARK MODE

Full support for dark mode on macOS 10.14.

Scrivener’s “Appearance” preferences allow you to take full control over colours and UI in each mode.

Switch between dark and light mode independently of the system settings using the Scrivener > Appearance menu.

Set up different colour themes for each mode via the Preferences, and switch between them using the Scrivener > Themes menu.

SCRIPTWRITING

Support for “MORE” and “CONT’D” when compiling for PDF and printing. (See new settings in the “Text Layout” area of the Compile format editor.)

Support for not splitting sentences across pages in scripts.

Dual dialogue support for print and PDF.

COMPILE

You can now include a cover image when compiling to PDF.

Enhanced options for compiling for printon demand services, including an option for PDF files to use the PDF/X3 format.

Epub 3 and Kindle KF8 formats now allow for direct formatting. With these changes, the older ePub 2 and Kindle Mobi formats have been removed, and will only be available for Compile formats created in older versions that rely on them.

It is now much easier to edit section layouts: a pencil icon appears when you move the mouse over a section layout in the main Compile window. Simply click on it (or doubleclick the layout) to begin editing.

Unused section types are now hidden by default in Compile’s “Assign Section Types”.

Section Layouts in the Compile format editor are now displayed in bold if they are used in the project, making it easier to identify the layouts you are most interested in.

Improvements have been made to footnotes in print and PDF, including several new options for how they are laid out.

Many, many other enhancements to Compile.

FOCUS MODE

A new “focus mode” is available via View > Text Editing > Focus. This allows you to fade out everything except the current line, sentence or paragraph as you write. The mode can be set independently for the main window and Compose.

WIDOWS AND ORPHANS

Widow and orphan control now supported in Scrivener’s page view. (Off by default use the “Editing” Preferences to turn it on.)

Widow and orphan control now supported when compiling to PDF or for printing.

Keep with Next has also been improved, and you can now determine whether the KWN paragraph itself can be split across pages or not.